On a hazy morning in mid-June, John Warren, the chief executive and general counsel of Cornell Watch Company in Chicago, took a seat at a coffee shop in the city’s Sherman Oaks neighborhood and placed the brand’s newest timepiece, called the Lozier, on the table.

“Everything on the watch that you see and touch — other than the crystal, which is from Tokyo — we mill on a Kern five-axis CNC machine in Ohio,” Mr. Warren said of the $6,200 model. “Then we hand finish everything. Final assembly occurs in Asheville, N.C., by two certified watchmakers.”

To most people, that description may sound unremarkable. But within the luxury watch industry, Mr. Warren’s comments would likely raise eyebrows.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States dominated the global watch trade thanks to its mastery of mass production. But by the time World War II had ended, the domestic watch factories, which had mobilized to join the war effort, could no longer compete with the Swiss. By the 1960s, no one was making an entire watch in the United States.

Until 2023, anyway. That year, J.N. Shapiro, an independent brand in Torrance, Calif., released what it called its “California-made” Resurgence watch. The model, priced at $70,000 to $85,000, featured a guilloché, or engraved, dial, the signature element of the watchmaker Joshua Nathan Shapiro.

Mr. Shapiro’s accomplishment reflected a broad shift in American watchmaking — one that largely began well before President Trump’s recent threats of tariffs on imported goods. The boom in independent watchmaking in the past five years or so has made it easier and more enticing for American brands such as Cornell — a storied pocket watchmaker founded in 1870 and revived in 2023, when Mr. Warren acquired the rights to its name — to produce timepieces in the country.

The shift has been so noticeable that on July 4, Zach Kazan, the managing editor of the watch site Worn & Wound, posted an editorial titled “Why American Watchmaking Is More Exciting Now Than It Has Been in Years.”

“If Cornell’s model is successful, it could dramatically change how we think about American watchmaking,” Mr. Kazan wrote. “Brands that previously outsourced to Switzerland, Japan and, yes, China, may decide to produce components here. Not out of some type of patriotic duty, but because the work is that good and the price makes sense.”

Authentically American

Just ask Mr. Warren. His motivation to make the Lozier’s stainless steel components in the United States (the movement is from Swiss maker Sellita) wasn’t nostalgia, but a desire for practicality and authenticity. “If we made this in Switzerland or Germany, it would cost the same, if not more,” he said. “The original company was here in the U.S., so we make the watch here to honor that legacy and carry it forward.”

Mr. Warren’s manufacturing partner, Zach Smith, the president of Hour Precision in Columbus, Ohio, is key to that effort. A self-taught machinist and watchmaker, Mr. Smith founded the company in 2019 after struggling to find the components he needed for watch repairs.

“I saw that it just wasn’t possible to get certain parts,” Mr. Smith said on a recent video call from his office in Columbus. “I couldn’t order them or the quality wasn’t there. It became a passion of mine to push American watchmaking and not just ordering components from China and saying, ‘It’s American.’ It was, ‘How do we actually do this thing?’”

After investing in the kind of CNC (computer numerical control) machines used by Swiss brands to precisely cut, shape and form materials based on digital designs, Mr. Smith can now fabricate nearly every component of a watch — except the jewels and springs. “But I probably would not put ‘American Made’ on it until I have the ability to make springs,” he said.

That touches a deeper issue. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a product labeled “Made in USA” must be “all or virtually all” made in the country. In contrast, Swiss law requires only 60 percent of a watch’s manufacturing costs to have been incurred in Switzerland. Critics have said that allows brands to buy parts from China while still calling their watches “Swiss Made.”

Challenges Accepted

The strictness of the American standard is one reason domestic watchmaking has been slow to rebuild over the past 50 years.

“The last fully Made-in-America watch was the 992B pocket watch made by Hamilton in 1969,” said Nicholas Manousos, the executive director of the Horological Society of New York. “They made millions of them in Pennsylvania. After that, no one even attempted to make a watch in the U.S.”

That helps to explain why Mr. Shapiro’s introduction of the Resurgence caused a stir among fans of independent watchmaking — so much so that Mr. Smith of Hour Precision has attributed the growing interest in domestic watch manufacturing to Mr. Shapiro’s example.

The brand has said that every part of the 38-millimeter watch is made in-house, except the springs inside the movement, which Mr. Shapiro buys from Switzerland, and the jewels, which are made by Microlap in North Dakota. “The hardest part,” Mr. Shapiro said in a recent interview, “was figuring out how to machine the gears, pinions and escapement components, then how to heat treat them. That was six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Mr. Shapiro said he will continue to make the Resurgence, which now has prospective buyers waiting 30 months for delivery, and he also offers the more affordable Infinity series, which combines in-house and outsourced parts.

But in the future, he intends to prioritize quality over nationalism, echoing other American watchmakers who have said that, in their experience, the craftsmanship and reliability of a timepiece are much more decisive factors for buyers than its origin.

“Going forward, I’m going to continue to make watches of extremely high quality,” he said, “but it’ll be less focused on the American-made aspect of it and more on the quality, which will do more for American watchmaking than if we keep hammering that it was made here.

“We want to be leading the way, saying, ‘There’s nothing special in the water in Switzerland.’”

Andi Felsl, the German founder and co-chief executive of Horage, a Swiss watchmaker and movement supplier, would agree.

In July, Horage exhibited at the Windup Watch Fair in Chicago, where it debuted a special edition of its DecaFlux model with a white dial and decorated “Road to USA” rotor. The phrase is also the name of the company’s new initiative, an effort to partner with American makers to allow them to build their own movements using the company’s new silicon-clad K3 movement architecture.

“There’s this big discussion about making stuff in the U.S. and it has nothing to do with Trump,” Mr. Felsl said during a video interview last month from his office in Bienne, Switzerland. “I believe watchmaking needs to come closer to the people. And looking at how things are being made on a professional scale is super interesting.”

Mr. Felsl said the greatest challenge to building a movement was that it took a lot more than watchmakers. “People forget: A watchmaker is trained to repair, not to design a movement or build a manufacturing infrastructure,” he said. “You need a mathematician, a business person, a watchmaker and an engineer. Without that combination, you will fail.”

The Revival Is On

Roland G. Murphy of RGM Watch Company in Pennsylvania knows this from experience. In 2007, after seven years of research and development, he introduced his first in-house movement, Caliber 801. With the help of a 12-person team, Mr. Murphy now produces four calibers at his workshop in Mount Joy — but he is skeptical about the prospects for domestic watch manufacturing on a large scale.

“If someone set out to make balance wheels and hairsprings here, who would they sell to?” he said. “You’d spend millions of dollars to set up and how many customers would you have?

“I don’t see industrial watchmaking coming back here, nor do I see it for toasters, bicycles and many other things. You can’t bring the past back even if you want to.”

Still, many continue to try. Keaton P. Myrick, an artisanal watchmaker in Oregon, recently had one of his pieces auctioned by Phillips for $38,100 — more than twice its low estimate.

In Houston, there is Jason Lu, the founder and watchmaker of 1776 Atelier. Mr. Lu, who works as a tech executive, already was a watch lover when in 2013 he discovered a vintage Hamilton pocket watch at a watch meet up. Struck by its beauty, Mr. Lu taught himself how to repair and eventually to fabricate movements.

He founded 1776 Atelier in 2024, but admitted he was unprepared for the project. “I underestimated everything,” he said. “I had a machine shop make plates and bridges for me in the United States. The bridges turned out perfect, but the plates had like a 50 percent failure rate. I came in and said, ‘I’m going to be able to do this for less than 100 grand.’ And I was so wrong. Orders and orders of magnitude off.”

Today, his company offers three models, all named for the homes of American presidents: Mount Vernon (George Washington); Monticello (Thomas Jefferson); and Sagamore Hill (Theodore Roosevelt). The fourth, Montpelier (James Madison), is on the way. It is to feature plates and bridges milled by DK Precision in Glashütte, Germany, and hands and dials manufactured by Hour Precision.

“No one watchmaker can single-handedly revive American watchmaking,” Mr. Lu said, “but we can certainly be part of the narrative. I’m trying my best to walk amongst a small group of cadres. Hopefully, we can tell people, ‘Hey, we did it once. We’re going to do it again.”